Roku rises by revenue stroke, and adds strength to the advertising business
People passing by a video sign display with the logo of Roku, a Fox-supported video streaming company that held its IPO on Nasdaq Marketsite in New York, September 28, 2017.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
Streaming platform Roku attributed an acceleration in overall revenue growth primarily to advertising growth as the platform's revenue-generated video ad impressions more than doubled year over year.
Roku shares were up more than 1[ads1]2% in after-hours trading on Wednesday. The company made an estimate, and sees a loss per share of SEK 8 on revenue of $ 250 million. Analysts had expected a loss of SEK 22 per share on revenue of $ 224 million, according to Refinitiv.
The company said its active accounts passed $ 30 million and average revenue per user reached $ 21.06, up $ 2.00 from Q1 2019. Total revenue growth accelerated to 59% year over year, the company said.
Roku believes it will benefit from the onslaught of upcoming launches of over-the-top streaming video services. Companies including Disney and NBCUniversal launch new services to better compete with Netflix.
"We are, to say the least, excited about the upcoming OTT services and believe that we are an important platform for these new services," Scott Rosenberg, senior director and general manager of Roku's platform operations, said of the company's revenue call.
"We have a whole host of audience development product products and features from when you set Roku up to ads on the home screen, with channel store placement, email devices. We recently launched a video ad unit that lets you run a download from a 30 -second place, and we continue to add new ad products such as those that help our content partners build the audience when they launch these services on the platform. "
Given increased scrutiny in the realm of personal data, Roku executives asked whether would have an impact on over-the-top spending.
"Of course, we take privacy very seriously as a company, but we have a first-party direct relationship with our consumers and it puts us in a unique position as a platform to both explain to consumers how their data is used and to control it," Said Rosenberg. "I just want to contrast it to third-party entities, intermediaries who do not have the direct consumer relationship, who will be more challenged to formulate and justify the use of data."
